Point Clouds

Point clouds have been around a lot longer than the Kinect: 3D scanning applications have been in use for a long time to build models for manufacturing and quality assurance, to digitize real life objects for use in movie special effects, and in the field of medical imaging, among other uses. However, the devices used to perform these 3d scans have been exorbitantly expensive.

Here at Second Story, we've been excited by the potential of such an inexpensive sensing device ($149.99 at the time of this writing). It wasn't long before a project came along where we wanted to map a large space. This space would require three Kinects to cover it. The two questions that immediately came to mind were, “Can we run multiple Kinects on one computer?” and “How do we align the multiple point clouds?”